Frequent visitors of this website may have wittingly discovered the somewhat lack of website over the past few weeks. Firstly, I would like to apologize if you were in any way traumatized by the outage.

I was planning to blame Amazon S3 for the downtime but that might be a little unfair because I actually don’t use their service. Blaming other people is always fun.

The slightly more boring truth is that a server software update corrupted the kernel (yes the server runs Linux) whilst I was in Denmark on holiday celebrating my team’s first-prize win in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup world finals in Paris (more about that later). Needless to say the fun I was having outweighed my desire to fix the server. Some of you may have even witnessed the fun I had discovering my inner-Pirate from a placeholder photo in the past couple of days (credit to my Denmark host and server operator for the captions).

Messed up kernels (in plural)? What gives? Are you running this website on the devils os (Linux)? If so; why is there a problem, I’ve been lead to believe that Linux is close to perfect and that it never fails…

True Long, very true. Nothing short of a kernel upgrade should corrupt a kernel. Anyhoo, shouldn’t happen again, and even if it does, there are contingencies in place to prevent prolonged downtime in future.

@JoeM: Very funny 😛 I’ve deployed 2k8 on a number of servers and I’m still not totally convinced it’s stable enough for production use. It’s good, no doubt, but the first and second deployments crashed repeatedly until I had to give up and go with 2k3 instead (which is rock-solid on the same hardware). Sure, it’s likely down to crappy drivers, but nevertheless it was unusable for us in those situations. With that said I’m currently studying for my MCITP in Server 2008 administration. At least it’s stable enough on Virtual PC 🙂